Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on March 19, 2009
Public Opinion Quarterly 2009 73(1):172-179; doi:10.1093/poq/nfp003
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Context Effects and Social Change
Address correspondence to Howard Schuman; e-mail: hschuman{at}umich.edu.
Strack and Martin (1987) have proposed that although probability samples of general populations are needed for studying attitude content, psychological processes such as context and other response effects can be investigated quite well or even better with homogeneous convenience samples. The present paper shows that, in contrast, when social change is included as an essential variable in a study of a well-known context effect, the process itself is weakened and may even disappear. The distinction between content and process is not always tenable in surveys once we include long-term social change as a variable, as we must as the horizon for survey research extends further and further into the future.
HOWARD SCHUMAN is with the Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 426 Thompson Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248. The 1980 data reported in Table 1 were gathered using funds from the National Science Foundation.